Our Yoga Philosophy: Ananda

This is an ongoing blog on different aspects of yoga philosophy, which will build week on week or may be read individually. I’m not an academic, my job as a yoga teacher is to break the philosophy into bitesize pieces and apply it to your practice and life…

Sat and Cit come more naturally to me. Ananda I always felt a little uncomfortable, maybe that’s because it’s often translated as bliss. Like if I was going for that I’d have to join a cult and hug a tree or something. I’m a 21st century girl, I like shoes and pretty things, I’m no hippy.

The way I finally got over it was to remember that Sat-Cit-Ananda are never really separate and Ananda is merely the spiralling expression of Sat and Cit. That is to say that when we feel a sense of our own deepest self there is simply no way we can keep that kind of news in. It’s like we fell in love with none of the hangups. You have to run out into the streets and dance, then run up to the top of the tallest building you can find and shout it from the highest rooftop.

This is what arises when there is a deep understanding of ourself and how that is connected to the rest of the cosmos, I great, swirling dance of consciousness, creating the universe out of sheer delight, which is unstoppable and beautifully powerful.

Ananda is the idea that when the self recognises that it is part of the same energy as the rest of the universe it can’t hep but reach out to itself, which is to say, reach out to the rest of consciousness, the rest of the universe. That’s when we begin to walk around and see beauty all around us, its because we’ve seen the beauty in itself and recognises itself in all things.

That’s why we sometimes just feel good just being around people who we resonate with. It is consciousness meeting consciousness and connecting at a level we cannot comprehend through the intellect, it’s something we feel. It’s truth, recognition coming together to release a potent form of bliss.

It’s the feeling when we sleep so deeply after a gracious yoga practice which fill us with intensity and demands so much and then drops us slowly and safely in Savasana and we stand up at the end a new person.

Adele Cassidy is a yoga teacher and spiritual adventurer. She loves to unveil to students that they are an integral part of this amazing world and a vital piece of something big, extraordinary and amazing. That each person is part of something that they never knew existed and yet always knew was there and that this life is a gift to be celebrated.